Comments: The Value of Brevity

You may have read my HUB about the ideal length of HUBS called The Long and the Short of It. I am of the opinion that short HUBS are better, and since writing that HUB in 2009, I have come to be of the opinion that short comments are better, too. I think this is especially true when a controversial subject is covered. I guess a lot of people like to open up a HUB and find hours worth of scrolling through angry, accusatory nit-picking and argument to sort through, but I am not one of them.

Generally speaking, when I see this kind of HUB, I scan through the comments and leave something brief at the end - and that’s a shame because I’m sure some of those comments reflect a lot of time and effort on the part of the writers.

This is why I began to wonder about the concept of simply working long comments up into HUBS of their own and exchanging links. I really can’t see any point at all in writing a thousand word comment.

Think about it...

• Lose control of it. It may disappear, or you may want to edit something. Too bad!
• Get no compensation for it. You get no ad sense revenue, no “likes” on FaceBook, no Tweets, no nothing!
• Get no addition to the number of HUBS you have written.

If the HUB your great comment is attached to sinks into obscurity, or is removed, there goes your comment!

While your rating as a commenter may go up, you could accomplish this with good 100 word comments.

So, for some time now, I have thought that, if I write a comment of more than 300 words (HUB minimum) I will work it into a HUB and let the author of the original HUB know. Conversely, I have decided that, on any controversial HUB I write, I will establish guidelines that reflect this.

Recently, I had the opportunity to do this when my comment on a political HUB ended up being 700+ words. I published it as an opinion piece and let the author know, and all hell broke loose!

I checked this HUB at 3 a.m. after a long night of writing contract type articles for a client and found quite a few comments and a goodly number of lengthy oppositional sorts of comments!

If you want to give this method a try, don’t do it that way! It never occurred to me that people would write a 300+ word comment in the HUB pages screen and not keep a copy of it! Many feathers were badly ruffled, and I do indeed apologize for the inconvenience.

However - I still think this is a good idea because:

• Limiting comments to 300 words presents a more readable page and a better reader experience.
• Turning longer comments into HUBS and forming an interlinking network creates more traffic.
• This, in turn, creates more revenue and increases readership.

I say this because I experienced all of these results with this one HUB that started out as a comment.

So, I am now launching into a follow-up of this opinion HUB that was a comment with a series of researched articles. This is a project I would not have undertaken if I had simply left a 700 word comment on someone else’s HUB. And…I plan to use the 300 word comment guideline for this project.

Comments guidelines...

Make the best use of the resources we have at hand! If you find that your comment is going to be longer than 300 words, take the very same words you used in your comment and create a HUB. Then link it to mine and any others that are applicable. I will link back to you and respond to you with a short comment, if appropriate, or a HUB.

Please address the issues brought up in the article in a direct, non-accusatory, non-inflammatory manner.

This will make better reading and be advantageous for everyone.

Thanks!

Of course, this will be tweaked as time goes on and I get more feedback. I will be interested to see how it works out for me in terms of the results I have mentioned above, and I hope other HUBBERS will want to try it. I’d like to know how it turns out for them as well.